Sunday, April 01, 2007

Everything Old Is New Again

or... People are the same everywhere, and always have been...

I have dozens of VHS tapes in my bookcase, of movies I taped over the years that I didn't want to watch at the time, and need to feel "in the mood" to watch them before I watch them now. And I rarely feel in the mood.

Today, I put in a tape, the label of which said, Torchy Blaine. I assumed, and I think with justification, that the movie on the tape would be Torchy Blaine (Torchy being a female reporter).

But not so, it was instead the last third of a movie called Julie, which starred Doris Day in a drama role, as a woman on the run from her abusive husband, Louis Jourdan. It ends with them on an airplane, and he shoots the pilot and co-pilot (himself being shot in the process) so that she has to land the plane herself, after a bit of training from the suffering co-pilot who eventually dies, and then with the help of a guy from the Tower.

I actually had the sound down throughout it all, so I don't know if Day's character had by any chance some pilot training in the past..but that's beside the point. The point is I went to the IMDB to see what was up with this film, and saw that it had 3 external reviews, one of which said:

"Take one part Sleeping with the Enemy (1991) and one part Airport 1975 (1974), add America's sweetheart and you've got an overwrought, low-budget, woman-in-peril thriller that will satisfy any fan of cool cinema trash."

And I'm thinkng to myself, "whaddya mean, take one part a movie from 1991, and one part a movie from 1974, when the movie you're talking about was made in 1956?" It is they who obviously stole, borrowed, etc, from this movie, not the other way around.

There are actually only about 10 movie plots everywhere, and only about 10 movie characters, and they're all recycled over and over and over again...